Thanatos
by Mariagoner
Summary: Vossler has at least 20 ways of finding reparations for lost causes. VosslerAshe, VosslerBasch, VosslerBalthier, VosslerPenelo.


As a follow-up to a meme I recently did on what sort of things people tend to associate with my fic, I somehow got the bright idea to try and write the anti-Mariagoner fic. As in, something without any snappy dialogue, droll/zany humor, tender scenes, happy endings or (hopefully!) colloquialisms that tend to mark my work like so many zits on Larsa's face once his balls finally descend. Mostly, I wanted to write a fic in this unusual (for me) style to see if I could write that way and end up with a decent end-product. I have no idea whether or not I succeeded in doing this but this was an interesting experiment nonetheless.

In any case, this is for Mithrigil. Happy birthday, beautiful. This fandom wouldn't be nearly as exciting without you in it!

And as always, reviews and comments are lovely and spur me on to right more. And in between this whole 'real life' gig, I certainly can use the encouragement. ;)

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**Title: Thanatos  
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII  
Main Characters/Pairings: Vossler/Ashe, Vossler/Basch, Vossler/Balthier, Vossler/Penelo  
Rating: Hard R, sexual situations, language  
Summary: Vossler has at least 20 ways of finding reparations for lost causes.**

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I. In his eyes and within his hands, he can make anyone wear a bit of her flesh. 

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II. When Vossler had been young, with a voice not yet broken, his father had once told him that true devotion, true fealty and even true love always required something driven to the end.

At the age of seven, with the broken remnants of his father's fingers pressed against his face, he had learned something of repentance. At the age of fourteen, having slaughtered his first werewolf, he had discovered something like courage. And at the age of seventeen, looking at the face of his future swaddled in the arms of her mother, he had memorized something that promised madness.

But in the end, the best lesson Vossler had ever learned from his sire went further even than that. True sacrifice, his father had once promised before being stolen away, always required relinquishing whatever could be lived against.

And years later, when all the world would broken about him, Vossler will close his eyes and think of sacrifice and do his very best. 

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III. For the sake of his country, Vossler has long since learned to sacrifice desire for duty, love for loyalty and resolve for something not unlike redemption. He cannot have his lady, he will never even touch his lady, and he lets it all go on in order to keep her safe from what could happen. He closes his eyes and turns his face and tries never to think of her near him except in dreams-that-are-dreams and silent agonies that promise nothing and nightmares that come terribly close to perdition. An in the end, Vossler will bend his head and willing give all he can to keep her safe and clear and unbroken.

But even still, some part of him knows that he could never deprive himself of at least the facsimile of her bed. 

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IV. Even Vossler would admit later that it was perverse to think that he can have something of her merely by reaching out to her kin.

Perhaps if her lord brothers had lived yet, he could have found satisfaction in them. Perhaps if her royal father had ripened into old age and found himself seeking stranger pleasures still, he would have found more uses for Vossler yet. Perhaps if her lady mother hadn't been so devoted to her family, or perhaps circumspect, Vossler could have explored half of what his lady had sprung from, from what she had arisen.

All of those would be treachery but still understandable perdition.

But that it should be him that Vossler turns to to touch her-- the oldest of her line and the last-- 

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V. But Vossler is always quick to wrap his tongue obediently around Ondore's cane and cock when called to do so. And he does not regret it even when he counts the bruises on his back in the days afterwards or has to deplete spell after spell in an effort to find some rest.

In the end, it was all just of flesh and blood, body and bone; uncle and niece, shoots and leaves. Heredity could not lie to him, not precisely.

And whenever Vossler reaches out for her family tree, he makes sure to touch only the most withered and fruitless branch. 

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VI. Her lips are easy to find in the faces of others because they are the part of her that least resembles perfection.

She is beautiful, all around her know well enough she is beautiful, but even the best of them (and he never one of them) wouldn't grant her face flawlessness. And if there is one space where she parts from prettiness, it lies in her mouth, where there has been the imprint of an oncoming snarl since the days of her groom walking into his death.

Her tongue though... Vossler hesitates over it, even as he traces his own over the pouts of whatever whores he can find in the lean days after the occupation. Her tongue and the insults she can send tripping over them still remain terrible and elusive. No one else, for better or for worse, can so effectively flay verbal bone from flesh. 

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VII. Oddly enough, however, he finds something approximating it within the most neatly cultivated ( of their new party. Balthier has, Vossler must concede, something more of a canniness than what really suited, something that outdistances even Ashe's wit.

And even more, Balthier has something of her ability to degrade, to make any that stood outside her eyes feel hopeless. And even as Vossler presses his own tongue against the curve of Balthier's cock and gags on his own spit, he let Balthier use him and whisper whatever he liked about Dalmascan loyalty into what lay beneath him.

Pirates, Vossler thinks, eyes narrowing even beneath such presses. Whores among pirates and what else can one expect from so whorish a pirate-- 

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VIII. And then he closes his eyes, very carefully, to avoid thinking of just what adjectives would fit him best. 

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IX. Sometimes Vossler ponders not just her face and features but his own as well, so sunken and so sullen in her midst.

Point by point, line by line, there is no similarity within their skin. Where she is all clean curves and airy angles, he is hard lines and knotted flesh. If she is air, he is fire; if she fire, he the aftermath. For all the irony of her name, she is what remains alight and ascendant while he can only hover somewhere beneath her and hope for her presence's scraps. 

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X. He is nothing like her, inside or out, and for her sake, he is glad. 

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XI. He had kissed her intended once, merely one time, to take the measure of just what he couldn't have.

There had been wine on his lips that night, enough to explain away any discrepancies of conduct in even the king's best guardsman. But there had been no wine within Rasler's mouth, nothing that could excuse anything more than a fumble curse, a muttered oath and an affronted prince pulling away from a piss-drunk Dalmascan noble that had mistaken him for someone else. After the first moment of confusion and the first disarray of limbs, the prince should have--

If it had been Vossler who had charged into the fray with him and not Basch, there would have been no corpse left to bring back. 

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XII. Occasionally, Vossler even finds himself wondering if the children of Rabanastre that follow them about might conceivably be of use to him.

The boy, he thinks, meant little enough, having nothing of grace or wit or even the precise texture of his lady's skin or nails or hair. But the girl, the girl, with her almond eyes and her sun-dark skin, with her girlish hips and smallish breasts...

She catches his eyes for a second, wind tossing about bound hair. And her face is still the face of a child's, her body slim and lithe, her smile shy and receptive. And she would suit if he could just lure her away, make her believe she longed for this--  
**  
**

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XIII. And he hates himself and all the world when she leaves his bed the day afterwards, practiced enough to make a discreet exit.

No true child of Dalmasca, he thinks wincing, should have to anticipate such requests. 

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XIV. Perhaps it didn't matter though. In his arms, he had called her by his lady's name and she had called him Reks. 

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XV. There are so many over the years that they begin to blur together, proxies with her skin and hair and breasts. He finds hair the shade of dreaming sand within hamlet villages, tracks down delicately pointed noises within his own resistance. He listens to low, sweet laughs within the throats of whores and demands from his companions flesh that has met her flesh.

But in the end, he finds satisfaction most with Basch, of all people. Basch, first and best. 

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XVI. It is a strange choice at first, even for one of Vossler's personal whims. Basch is off by almost two decades, almost two years of solitude and suffering, and an innumerable number of scars and lacerations. And though Vossler knows all too well that there has been no point in correspondence between her lips and Basch's for at least the last few years, between his mouth and her flesh, Vossler is all too compelled to map all that Basch has regardless, as though trying to trace her from within.

She had loved Basch once, Vossler knew all too well. She might have forgotten, might have willed herself to forget, but there had been a time when she had barely risen to their elbows, had to stand upon chairs to reach their shoulders, and swung her hands freely around their yoked necks. And even then, much as she did now, she had been with Basch most often, had offered her company to him first and best, had pressed her skin against Basch's so often that even now, years afterwards, some impression of hers must have sunk in.

And perhaps this is why Vossler spends his time first and most often with the man. Perhaps this is why he accepted him back, allowed him to carry a sword freely again within his hands, gave him once more the task of guarding her when he himself failed. And perhaps this is why Vossler finds himself in Basch's midst night after night, within the interims during which the children squabble and the sky pirates scheme and his princess dreams short dreams of conquest.

Basch's skin is as rough as ever beneath his fingernails; Basch's hair just as textured, Basch's cock just as velvety when Vossler strains to receive it inside him. Of all the bedmates Vossler has ever taken, Basch had to be the finest and most willing, if not also the least perverse in all the usual senses.

Basch doesn't protest anything that Vossler takes from him, not even with a breath. Not even when Vossler steals his from him, sinking down on him with a laugh.

But then, after all that has happened to him, all his own flesh and blood has done to him, Vossler has to wonder if he even can. 

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XVII. He traces the peripheries of her body and brilliance in a million faces and a million voices and tries to feel content.

And still there are days when he loves her much too much and nights in which his tongue about her uncle's cane or his muscles clenched against her protector's prick can do nothing to soothe him. And there is a madness in his blood that comes from the passion in hers and he knows he will do her ill sooner or later, knows he cannot help it. There is something in him doomed to hurt her yet, pierce her in ways she can't comprehend, shatter what hasn't broken--

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XVIII. Love, Vossler decides, is its own form of madness; repentance its method of an end. 

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XIX. But for all his efforts, he finds that no one has fingers quite the way she has: slim and strong and straight angled, with blood as blue as the ocean coursing through the veins beneath battle-hardened flesh. And even as he pauses to kiss the hands of another member of royalty-- that of Archadia, no less-- he knows full well the truth of what he does now, of the doom he courts so readily at her hands.

A man can travel the whole world, Vossler realizes as he seals his fate, and never find fingers like that. 

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XX. And years later, when she stifles her sobs as she scourges his blood away from her knuckles and nails, she will think upon his resigned face in the end and wonder why he had almost laughed.


End file.
